The funeral Mass for Honoria Chalons was held Saturday morning in Jeanerette. I attended it, although I took a pew at the back of the church and made no attempt to offer condolences or to accompany the funeral possession to the cemetery. That afternoon I was at Wal-Mart and had one of those experiences that make me wonder if our commonality lies less in our humanity than the simple gravitational pull of the earth and a grave that is already dug and numbered.
The sweeping breadth of the store's interior was crowded with people for whom a Wal-Mart is a gift from God. In my hometown, most of these are poor and uneducated, and assume that the low-paying jobs that define their lives are commonplace throughout the country. The fact that the goods they buy are often shoddily made, the clothes sewn in Third World sweatshops by people not unlike themselves, is an abstraction that seems to have no application to the low price on the item.
By late Saturday afternoon every trash can in front of the store is overflowing on the sidewalk. The parking lot is littered with dumped ashtrays, fast-food containers, chicken bones, half-eaten fruit, soft drink and beer cans, and disposable diapers that have been flattened into the asphalt by car tires. It's the place where the poor go, or those who don't want to drive twenty miles to Lafayette. It's not where I expected to see Raphael Chalons on the day of his daughter's burial.
But he was three places in front of me at the cash register, dressed in a dark suit and a tie and starched white shirt, even though the temperature had been in the nineties all day. His hair was as sleek and black as a seal's pelt, his face that of a stricken man.
In one hand he held a jar of peanut brittle while he stared out the front window. In his tailored suit and shined shoes, he looked like a visitor from an alien world.
"You got to put it on the counter, suh," the cashier said. She was a short, overweight Cajun woman, with a round face and thick glasses and hair pulled back tightly on her head.
"Pardon?" he said.
"You got to put the peanut brittle down so's I can scan it," she said.
"Yes, I see," he replied.
"Wit' the tax, that's fo' dol'ars and t'ree cents," she said.
"It's what?"
She repeated the amount. But he didn't take his wallet from his pocket. She tried to smile. Her eyes seemed unnaturally large behind the magnification of her glasses and it was obvious she knew something was wrong and that she could not correct it. The two people waiting in line immediately behind Raphael Chalons took their purchases to another counter.
"Suh, you want to pay me? It's fo' dol'ars and t'ree cents," the cashier said.
"Oh yes, excuse me. I'm sure I have my wallet here somewhere. How much did you say?"
I pushed a five-dollar bill across the counter to the cashier. She took it without speaking, returned my change, and dropped Raphael Chalons's jar of peanut brittle in a plastic sack. I picked it up and handed it to him. He walked a short distance away, then stopped in the concourse and removed the jar from the sack and read the label on it, oblivious to the shoppers who had to walk around him.
"Can I offer you a ride to your automobile, Mr. Chalons?" I said.
"No, I'm quite all right. But thank you for your courtesy," he replied, looking at me as though my face were not quite in focus.
"May I speak with you outside?" I asked.
He walked ahead of me, the jar of peanut brittle clasped in his hand, the sack with the receipt inside it blowing away in the draft through the sliding doors. The woman who checked purchases at the entrance held up her hand to stop him. I knew her and placed my palm on Mr. Raphael's shoulder and gestured at her in a reassuring way.
He entered the crosswalk and was almost hit by an SUV.
"Let me arrange to have someone drive you home," I said.
He stared at the label on the jar and either did not hear me or chose to ignore the content of my words. "The store didn't have the kind she liked," he said.
"Sir?"
"Honoria loved peanut brittle and pralines. I was going to bring her back some from New Orleans, but I forgot. It was such a small gift. But I forgot to buy it."
"Mr. Chalons, I know your family bears me enmity, but I want to offer my sympathies. I also want you to understand that I never had a romantic liaison with your daughter and that I always respected her. Both my mother and my second wife, Annie, died at the hands of violent men, and for that reason I think I can understand the nature of your loss. I thought your daughter was a good person. It was an honor to have been her friend."
He looked at the parking lot, the heat shimmering on the rows of vehicles, an American flag popping on an iron pole.
"That's very kind of you," he said. "But you're a police officer, and you were in our guesthouse for reasons of a romantic nature or to make use of my daughter in a legal investigation. Whichever it was, sir, it belies your statement now."
I should have walked away. But there are certain moments in our lives that even the saints would probably not abide, and I suspect being impugned as a liar is one of them. "I think your son is at the heart of a great iniquity," I said.
"My son?" he said, one eye narrowing with confusion. "Which son are you talking about? What are you saying to me? My son is —"
He pinched his temples and broke off in midsentence, as though both his words and thoughts had been stolen from him. A gust of hot wind blew a fast-food container tumbling past the cuffs of his trousers, splattering the fabric and the tops of his shoes.